For the past several years, we have asked our staff: What is the most significant cultural encounter you have had this year? We define “cultural encounter” loosely—our previous entries have ranged from pieces of music to stand-up comedy. Our list this year is wide-ranging as well, encompassing everything from dance performances to a radio station. We hope the items on this list give you much to consider—and enjoy.
—the editors
Marina Magloire, “Moving Towards Life”
The two great temptations of feminist biography are celebration and censure. It has become hard to write about historical women without either flattening them into role models for us in the present or condemning their failure to be. (I blame the long and noble history of feminist self-criticism, the blogosphere of the 2010s, or the publishing industry, depending on my mood.) A few books I read this year—especially Cynthia Carr’s Candy Darling and Jane Kamensky’s Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution—chart a more honest path. But the work of feminist biography that I have thought about most is Marina Magloire’s essay “Moving Towards Life,” which recounts how the poets June Jordan and Audre Lorde ended their friendship in the wake of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila. When Jordan wrote an open letter critiquing Jewish American feminists—and singling out Adrienne Rich, a friend of both Jordan’s and Lorde’s—for equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, Lorde intervened to block the letter’s publication. Magloire shows how the Palestinian cause marked a limit to Lorde’s otherwise capacious solidarity.
To my mind, this effort to see Lorde fully and clearly is more valuable than a dozen celebrations. Magloire’s portrait of Jordan’s commitment to Palestinian liberation, even at the expense of her friendships, helps us see Jordan more fully too. Jordan herself practiced this kind of honest feminist accounting in her open letter: “I claim responsibility for the Israeli crimes against humanity because I am an American and American monies made these atrocities possible.” —sam huber, acting editor
Alexei Ratmansky, Solitude
In February, I went to see a twelve-day-old ballet at Lincoln Center that has stayed with me. Classical dance can be beautiful, athletic, and it can sort of tell a story, but I never expect it to say anything complex about war, or love, or grief. Solitude, by the Russian Ukrainian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, changed that for me. Ratmansky had been making a new piece for the Bolshoi when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and immediately left Moscow, condemning the war. He joined the New York City Ballet as an artist-in-residence in August 2023.
Solitude begins with a boy lying onstage, apparently dead, his father kneeling beside him. A strange and alluring dance takes place around them. Then, as in a late Shakespearean romance, the son rises. He attends his own funeral. When the ritual is over, the father, alone on the dark stage, spins and falls, leaps and crawls; his grief cannot be assuaged. Instead, we witness it. Perhaps we can help, if only by lending our attention. Solitude closes as it had opened, with the boy prostrate and the father numb. But that tableau—which Ratmansky took from a press photograph—now vibrates with war’s pitilessness. —joanna biggs, deputy editor
Alice Rohrwacher, La chimera
Alice Rohrwacher’s film La chimera has interred itself in my imagination and won’t budge. The movie, set in Italy, follows a gang of “tombaroli,” tomb raiders, who rob funerary goods from Etruscan graves to sell on the black market. To locate the tombs, the gang depends on the divining powers of a penniless archaeologist named Arthur, played with notable complexity by Josh O’Connor. Arthur ekes out an abject existence on the edge of the gang’s small town, grieves the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend, and plagues her eccentric mother, Flora (an exceptional Isabella Rossellini), with frequent visits.
La chimera is unsentimental about the realities of modern rural life. Its grubby, wintry palette evokes the desperation that the characters endure. Yet the film is also tender, and it delights in the grotesque and the slapstick. It speaks of love and loss, of how dirt and treasure go together.
Archaeology was part of my childhood. My father, who worked on digs in Italy during the 1960s, taught me how to read the landscape for clues about what might lie beneath it. He is now in his eighties and talks about his youth as if it were yesterday. Midway through watching La chimera, I felt the film and my family memories collapse into each other. I left the cinema shaken and speechless. It made me think how rare and powerful it is for a work of art, almost by chance, to speak so directly to the heart. Corny, I know, but from the ruins of 2024, I’d like to salvage that experience as a continuing possibility. —dan fox, senior editor
Jenny Holzer, Light Line
In September, I went to see Light Line, a Guggenheim retrospective for the artist Jenny Holzer, whose “truisms” are embedded in our cultural memory. (abuse of power comes as no surprise has been frequently revived in the past decade.) LED tickers, a recreation of her iconic 1989 installation, ran along each level of the museum, phrases gliding by with idiosyncratic urgency. I began to ascend. Cast metal fragments, etched with Trump’s tweets, cascaded down a section of wall. I’d seen this work in a show of new pieces a few years before, and I’d left the gallery feeling disappointed, having arrived with the expectation of being moved by language.
The breadth of the retrospective gave me hope for a more alchemical experience. The introductory text explained that artwork was tucked away in stairwells and bathrooms to recreate encountering Holzer’s truisms as they were first displayed in public, on billboards and marquees—that is, in unexpected places. Rather than peer into every bathroom (there are so many), when I reached the top, I walked down the back staircase, which, it occurred to me then, must be the official fire escape. A framed pencil etching hung at each landing. They were faint, smudged, and poorly lit—I had to get close to read one: some days you wake and / immediately start to worry / nothing in particular is wrong, / it’s just the suspicion that forces are aligning quietly / and there will be trouble. The effect was something like leaning in to hear a whisper, only for someone to mouth the words as if they were a scream. —will frazier, digital director and managing editor
David Naimon, Between the Covers
2024 was the year I finally discovered the best literary podcast in the game: Between the Covers with David Naimon. Each episode features a single writer in dialogue with Naimon, a gentle interlocutor who always shows up having done what seems like a dissertation’s worth of research into his guest’s life and work. In several episodes this year, Naimon hosted brilliant anti-Zionist thinkers: Palestinian novelists Isabella Hammad and Adania Shibli; revolutionary poets Danez Smith and Dionne Brand; and writer-activists Cecilia Vicuña and Naomi Klein, to name a few. And probably because it feels amazing to be engaged by such a curious, diligent interviewer, these writers consistently seem to become the most forthcoming versions of themselves in Naimon’s presence. Other episodes that linger strongly in my memory, both recent and archival, include this genius craft talk by Torrey Peters, this conversation with Solmaz Sharif on the social limitations of poetry, and this deep dive into the ethics of translation with Rosmarie Waldrop. —maggie millner, senior editor
Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”
A number of cultural experiences have lingered with me this year—the divine energy of Bruce Springsteen in concert, the power of Percival Everett’s James. But there’s one I can’t stop talking about: Rose Horowitch’s Atlantic article “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” For years, I have worried about how few novels my young teenagers study in school, and Horowitch validated these fears. “Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books,” she writes, because middle and high schoolers do not learn to engage with literature at length. In my district, packets of poetry and short fiction are the norm; my children have even been assigned book excerpts instead of whole books. Short texts are no substitute for being immersed in a book from beginning to end. Horowitch deftly reports possible roots of reading’s demise, from the rise of smartphones to the emphasis schools place on passing standardized tests. I hold out hope that her findings can convince more educators to embrace the entirety of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, rather than reduce the reading experience to a few cut-out chapters. —jill pellettieri, consulting editor
Square Enix, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light or Zhang Lü’s The Shadowless Tower? Hisham Matar’s My Friends or Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain? “Dark Vacay” by Cigarettes After Sex or the Centre Pompidou’s Corps à corps exhibition? I contemplated selecting each for my entry, but when I think of what I most needed this year, it was the escapist immersion of video games. The brilliant Metaphor: ReFantazio came close, but I couldn’t resist choosing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
When I was ten years old, I adored the original Final Fantasy VII, a classic JRPG about a ragtag group banding together to save the planet. The multipart reimagining is a millennial nostalgia fever dream, yes, but surprisingly postmodern too. The antagonist, Sephiroth, is metatextually aware that he is in a remake, and the plot is based on mistaken identities and doppelgängers—every character, especially Cloud Strife, holds a Hitchcockian secret.
The modernization makes for an uncanny experience. It’s as if the original has not been improved upon but transformed into what I imagined in youth—blocky polygons are now soaring HD vistas, teeming with wildlife and banter. The first time my party entered Cosmo Canyon and my favorite audio track
from the original played with a full orchestra, I put my controller down, and I cried. —adam dalva, contributing editor
Rachel Martin
If you missed artist Rachel Martin’s solo exhibition at the Hannah Traore Gallery . . . well, I did too, and I’m kicking myself. But you can still experience joy, as I do, by following Martin on Instagram, where she posts her wonderful drawings in graphite and colored pencil. Martin is based in New York, but I was introduced to her work when she was a virtual artist-in-residence at the Anchorage Museum in 2021. (Anchorage is my hometown; my dear friend is the chief curator.) Martin is Alaska Native on her father’s side but grew up in the Lower 48, at a distance from her Tlingit community and homelands. Her art-making feels like one method of repairing that rupture, of celebrating the continuity and vitality of her culture. (On Instagram, she also shares her ongoing study of Lingít language.) Martin incorporates Tlingit formline design in her depiction of female figures who are marked by broader contemporary custom—wearing thongs or floral dresses, flashing Nikes or baring manicured toes. In doing so, she seems to discover the visual vocabulary needed to access affective experiences both recurrent and new. The drawings are witty, exuberant, and fierce. And in the pleasing simplicity of pencil on paper, they affirm art as a daily practice, something that might be done at the breakfast table—a way of nourishing the self and finding delight. —rachel mannheimer, contributing editor
WKCR-FM, Columbia University’s student-run radio station
In a year full of darkness and tension, the student broadcasters of Columbia University and Barnard College were a shining light of creativity and integrity. I’ve been a casual listener to WKCR-FM for years, but it wasn’t until this past April that I became a devotee, constantly tuning in to their brave on-the-ground coverage of the police crackdown on campus activism. I’ve been hooked ever since. Their day-to-day programming, while rooted in the station’s unique place in jazz history, ranges from classical Indian music to seventeenth-century madrigals to Latin hip-hop, and it is selected with deep knowledge and care—offering a sharp contrast to the uniformity of more popular radio stations. I’m especially grateful for how often they play Eric Dolphy, a still-underappreciated genius whose strange, beautiful music is a perfect response and antidote to our time. —jack hanson, associate editor
Whitney Museum of American Art and the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, Edges of Ailey
This October at the Whitney, I saw Edges of Ailey, a celebration of the iconic Black choreographer Alvin Ailey.
As a dancer, I was enthralled by how curators spliced archival footage: Clips of his renowned solo Cry were woven together, featuring different performers and performances, highlighting subtle variations in timing and expression. I watched it in full at least twice, exclaiming to a friend about the nuances in the arc of an arm, the held strain of a move across the floor like an embodied fermata.
As a historian, I felt magnetically drawn to the pages of Ailey’s notebooks. There were plans for costumes and staging, complete with sketches, drafts of company rules, letters, and poems. My favorites were the aphoristic notes to self, written in confident all-caps Sharpie on a steep diagonal. we teach people to feel—to own their own feelings, went one, red marker on graph paper. Another page, marked on the taste of the american public, listed, in both blue and black ink, religious / in search of romance / spectacle / sex / form / good + listenable music / nostalgia / hope / happiness / entertainment. This is a vision of art in America that I can get behind: communal, joyful, restlessly searching, composed equally of the personal and the socially conscious. “Dance is life,” Ailey said. “When you can’t move, you’re dead.” —caitlin kossmann, editorial assistant
Parapraxis and Jewish Currents
It feels like the flue for free speech is choking shut. The once and future president Donald Trump threatens to deport campus protesters for vocalizing their support of Palestine; artists, journalists, and academics are silenced and removed from their posts; humanities departments and school libraries are shut down; and book bans proliferate. In the midst of it all, my admiration has grown for those who name the present clearly, artfully, and urgently. For those who demonstrate both the possibilities and impossibilities of language during a genocide and epistemicide. In a Poem of the Week for The Yale Review, the Gazan poet Doha Kahlout writes, “I call out the powerless names, the narrow definitions.”
This past year, I have been particularly grateful to two publications: Parapraxis and Jewish Currents. While prominent papers of record restrict and avoid the use of words like genocide and ethnic cleansing, these magazines have devoted significant space to digesting indigestible histories of dispossession and bringing careful thought to the ongoing unthinkable. Given my own work in queer theology, I have especially appreciated Hussein Omar’s essay “Homo Zion,” which situates contemporary conversations about pinkwashing within longer histories of colonial anti-sodomy laws and gay desire for security in the early years of the AIDS crisis. As the state (again) turns against those who name its violence, silence will become increasingly tempting. But love—of people and of language—asks that we find and use imperfect words. —samuel ernest, assistant editor
Robert Glasper, Code Derivation
Jazz pianist and producer Robert Glasper is the king of collaborations. Whether you know it or not, you may have heard him play for Kendrick Lamar, Leon Bridges, H.E.R., Bilal, and many more. If I had to describe his sound in a single word, it would be fluid. He’s as comfortable carrying a song’s atmosphere as he is taking the wheel for an improvised solo. His chords roll through and overlap like waves, whether played on a classical piano or a Fender Rhodes.
On his album Code Derivation, Glasper brings his signature versatility to music production. Each track exists in two forms: one performed live, another “flipped,” as he puts it, into a hip-hop beat by invited producers—an homage to the jazz influence in hip-hop.
To bookend the album, Glasper revives the lost art of the skit—usually an improvised comedic bit by the artists. Skits on Code Derivation feature sonic detritus from sound checks and even a phone call from Glasper’s son, Riley, who is also a producer on the album: “Yo, Pops, that ‘Say Less’ joint that you sent a couple days ago? It’s crazy, man; you already know I had to chop it.” —rené kooiker, assistant editor
Bread and Puppet
A friend of mine once spent a summer working at a circus (I wasn’t too surprised, as it wasn’t out of character for this particular friend). Back in September, I got the exciting opportunity to see that circus—called Bread and Puppet—perform for myself when it came to my city. (Bread and Puppet is based in Vermont but travels all over the country.) As it turns out, in this context “circus” means “left-wing political theater featuring giant papier-mâché puppets.” I sat on the lawn of Cambridge Common, entranced by a school bus parked atop the grass and draped with a banner announcing the title of the show: The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus. Dressed almost entirely in white, a live band played. Puppets rushed into view: a life-size pink elephant, bipedal goats holding hands, a winged pig defeating a clown in a hat that read empire. Critiques of capitalism. Stories from Gaza. At one point, the troupe invited the children in the audience to come up and literally run a presidential race. After the show, they served everybody German rye bread slathered with a startlingly spicy bright-green aioli. What more could one want from a weekend afternoon? Panem et circenses, indeed. —yung in chae, assistant editor
Dirk van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library
I read more Beckett this year, but I don’t know what to say about it. So I’ll say something about reading about Beckett—or, rather, about reading about Beckett’s reading, in Dirk van Hulle and Mark Nixon’s awesome 2013 book, Samuel Beckett’s Library. Van Hulle and Nixon walk the reader through Beckett’s reading habits and his job as a “crrritic.” It was not a job he held long, or in high esteem, but he did it anyway. He read novels and poems and diaries and biographies and tractuses and dictionaries and scientific writings penned during various periods in English, French, Italian, and German. He marked up much of what he read; next to a passage in which Proust describes the text as the reader’s magnifying glass, he wrote: “Balls.” He couldn’t bring himself to annotate his collection of Joyce. He couldn’t bother keeping Balzac on his shelves. He admired the critic Sainte-Beuve as a novelist; it was a pity, he thought, to witness the waste of a “most interesting mind” on criticism. (Balls!) Beckett’s erudition—on full display here—has long intimidated me. Van Hulle and Nixon helped me see that he was not a born genius but a lifelong student. —angelo hernandez sias, senior reader